Ex-DEA agent: Opioid crisis fueled by drug industry and Congress

In the midst of the worst drug epidemic in American history, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s ability to keep addictive opioids off U.S. streets was derailed – that according to Joe Rannazzisi, one of the most important whistleblowers ever interviewed by 60 Minutes. Rannazzisi ran the DEA’s Office of Diversion Control, the division that regulates and investigates the pharmaceutical industry. He says the opioid crisis was allowed to spread – aided by Congress, lobbyists, and a drug distribution industry that shipped, almost unchecked, hundreds of millions of pills to rogue pharmacies and pain clinics providing the rocket fuel for a crisis that, over the last two decades, has claimed 200,000 lives.

His greatest ire is reserved for the … middlemen that ship the pain pills from manufacturers, like Purdue Pharma and Johnson & Johnson to drug stores all over the country. Rannazzisi accuses the distributors of fueling the opioid epidemic. “This is an industry that allowed millions and millions of drugs to go into bad pharmacies and doctors’ offices, that distributed them out to people who had no legitimate need for those drugs,” [said Rannazzisi]. In 2013, Joe Rannazzisi and his DEA investigators were trying to crack down. Then … with the help of members of Congress, the drug industry began to quietly pave the way for legislation that essentially would strip the DEA of its … ability to immediately freeze suspicious shipments of prescription narcotics to keep drugs off U.S. streets.